Travelport continues to grow non-air revenues

Travelport's "Beyond Air" initiative has helped it turn in a strong start to its financial year, with payments business eNett and hospitality bookings supplementing a decent performance from air.

Topline financials show net revenue up 6% compared with the same quarter last year to $609 million with adjusted EBITDA up 12% to $154 million.

Within the overall Beyond Air business unit, eNett's growth continues, increasing net revenue by 76% to reach $33 million in the quarter. Travelport also talked up an increase in its hospitality attachment rate to 43% as contributing towards an increase of 23% in its overall non-air revenues to reach $135 million.

Beyond Air as a proportion of its Travel Commerce Platform (or GDS) revenues is now 23% compared with 20% in the same quarter last year.

While non-air is growing as a proportion of the GDS revenues, air is still on the increase, albeit at a slower rate. Air revenues were up by 3% to $444 million.

Europe is not only its biggest region for GDS bookings but also the region with the strongest growth. It was up 18% to reach revenues of $195 million.

"Latin America and Canada" was up by the same amount but only accounts for $28 million.

Talking to analysts on the earnings call and on the phone with Tnooz, president and CEO Gordon Wilson explained that the B2B travel payments sector in which eNett operates is "an $810 billion dollars a year marketplace" and that eNett's growth was coming "70% from existing customers, 30% from new customers."

One part of Travelport's "Beyond Air" business which Wilson was keen to highlight to the analysts was Mobile Travel Technologies, the Dublin-based mobile specialist Travelport paid €55 million for last July

He said that airline apps built by MTT had been downloaded around 22 million times, which is a 10% increase in the past three months.

What he was particularly keen to point out was that MTT is developing consumer-facing apps for airlines by connecting to systems run by Travelport's competitors.

"So MTT has built the Etihad app and Etihad are a big customer of Sabre; they've built the app for Singapore Airlines which is a big customer of Amadeus. So we proud that these airlines are choosing MTT over whatever mobile capabilities our competitors have."

MTT could also help improve Travelport's relationship with travel management companies by bringing hotel bookings into its mobile tools. "Lots of corporate bookings are made on the go and are not attached to a flight, so we're looking at self-enabled hotel bookings via an app, factoring in duty of care and policy requirements."

Wilson was more than usually explicit about Travelport's improving status within its competitive set. "They're [our competitors] are talking a lot about payments but no-one has got anything to match eNett," he said. "We're on version 7 of our desktop solution while they are talking about new ones. And there will always be competitors essentially buying share but overall there's no major change."

Travelport believes it is outperforming the overall GDS market for air bookings with Asia Pacific and Latin America areas where it winning share. Asia Pacific is doing well, with market share gains registered in India, Indonesia and South Korea.

One under-the-radar deal which was revealed in the call is an exclusive distribution deal with India's OYO Rooms, effectively opening up the budget aggregator's 5,500 hotels in India to any Travelport-connected agent around the world.